European Commission Limits Food-Based Biofuel

The European Commission (EC) has proposed to limit the amount of food crops that can be used for making biofuels in the European Union. The move comes after several studies have shown that not all biofuels are equal in greenhouse gas emissions.

Under the Renewable Energy Directive, 10 percent of all transport fuels were to be renewably sourced by 2020. The related Fuel Quality Directive set a greenhouse gas reduction target of 6 percent by 2020 for fuels used in transport. When these goals were set, the contribution from biofuels was expected to be fairly high.

The European Commission wants to limit the use of food crops as a source of biofuel, and instead promote non-food sources, such as this Miscanthus, or elephant grass, grown in the UK, as a biofuel feedstock. (Source: Wikimedia Commons/David Wright)

The percentage of food-based biofuels allowed to contribute to that 10 percent will now be limited to 5 percent of the total, which is the current consumption rate, up until 2020. After that year, the EC wants to give financial incentives only to those biofuels that aren't produced from food and feed crops, and that lead to "substantial" greenhouse gas savings.

The EC's reasons for the changes are "to stimulate the development of alternative, so-called second generation biofuels from non-food feedstock, like waste or straw, which emit substantially less greenhouse gases than fossil fuels and do not directly interfere with global food production," according to a press release.

Some recent studies indicate that certain biofuels may actually add as much to greenhouse gas emissions as the fossil fuels they are designed to replace. The EC says this became clear when the studies accounted for changes in indirect land use. Those changes can happen when the production of biofuel from a food crop forces a shift in the production of human food or animal feed crops to land that has not been previously cleared for agricultural use, such as forests.

The proposal calls for several changes. It requires that, when assessing a biofuel's greenhouse gas performance, in order for it to be counted toward the targets and receive support, its estimated global land conversion impacts, or Indirect Land Use Change (ILUC), must now be included in reports by fuel suppliers and member states. The proposal also increases the greenhouse gas savings threshold for new installations to a minimum of 60 percent.

Currently, biofuels must emit at least 35 percent less greenhouse gases than the fossil fuels they replace; increasing to 50 percent in 2017. This change is designed to improve biofuel production process efficiency and discourage more investments in existing installations with low greenhouse gas performance.

@GeorgeG: I don't think I agree with your statement that "in the long view, the more frequently a material is recycled, the more energy it uses." Obviously, recycling takes energy -- but the recycled product is presumably taking the place of a new (virgin) product, so the net energy usage is less than making two parts out of virgin material.

It sounds like you are saying that throwing things away is less wasteful than recycling them. That just doesn't compute.

That being said, the steel industry's lifecycle assessments may be significantly overstating actual recovery rates for recycling. A recent study published in Science magazine shows that, even though metals are infinitely recyclable in principle, the reality falls far short of that. Recovery rates, even for commonly-used metals such as steel, are not much above 50%. A typical piece of steel might be recycled 2 or 3 times in its lifetime before it becomes unrecoverable, certainly not hundreds or thousands of times.

I'm hoping to interview the author of this study for Design News later this month, so stay tuned.

Thanks for that detail, George. In the study on steel I read, it wasn't specific about what was meant by "processing." I would guess that is pretty much everything that happens from raw materials to vehicle manufacturing.

I think GeorgeG's points are very well-taken. Although my article discusses European issues, the biofuel-and-food-crops situation is a global one, and anything that far-reaching is complex, with multiple parameters and multiple variables. Plus, as Greg mentions, our tools have become more fine-tuned. Although we might prefer it otherwise, alternative solutions have had to be tested in the field, so to speak, before we could get to this point in our understanding.

It's too bad that it's taken six years since the global food crisis began for the role of biofuels to be publically recognized by policymakers. That's six years too late for millions of people in the developing world. But at least this problem is finally being taken seriously.

It is always interesting to see what happens when the unanticipated results of decisions made based on emotion instead of logic become a bit more obvious. The short term problem of bidding up food prices is only one aspect that should have been expected. It will be very educational to see where the EU winds up after the full reality of their choices becomes clearer.

It may be a bit like the consequences of that ROHS set of rules, which have caused quite a few unintended results. Once again, acting on emotions instead of facts does cause problems.

" the steel industry's claim that composites eat more energy than steel during processing, and that steel costs less to recycle." -- ah, the complexities of the problem. This argument shows that if you choose to optimize on specific components you can come up with huge fails. The first rule of optimizing a system is to avoid local optimization. When it comes to minimizing total energy use, composites win by a large margin. Aluminum is awful but gets quite a bit better because of low energy intensity and environmental impact when recycled: ~5% energy recycled to raw. Steel is never a challenger for anything as it is less malleable and less stable - particularly it's environmental impact because of chemical processes needed to make a finished product. Recycled steel uses ~26% of the energy for raw steel. Having worked with composites, steel and aluminum for automotive and aircraft construction, I'm not sure what 'processing' they're even talking about - the heat load required to form and shape composites is much smaller than for the other two. Of course, if you were to consider the lifetime energy consumption of transportation products, composites and aluminum have a substantial energy use advantage over steel. One should also consider material turns i.e. what is the lifetime of the material in use, because, in the long view, the more frequently a material is recycled, the more energy it uses. One of the technical problems with sourcing aluminum, especially extruded or cast components, is that the majority of the price is energy content. Of course, the contribution of steel to acid rain is well known.

Is it possible that the Europeans have seen the light? While they may make the public pronouncement why they are considering alternatives to "food" sources for fuel, could it be that this is just a mask to restrict outrage from the far left that has been at the forefront in demanding the use of these raw materials into fuel supplies? Maybe they've seen the astronomical rise in the price of a bushel of corn in the U.S., since we've gone to ethanol supplements, AND maybe they're beginning to reel seriously from their recent catastrophic directives of ROHS, etc.

As more conservative leaders in Europe emerge, they may be attempting to shift the thinking to an incremental approach to change, instead of a revolutionary approach to change. Just as you cannot stop a rolling steam engine on a dime, so too you cannot stop an entire economy or process on that same dime! It just may be that someone has calculated the tillable land available in the greater European Continent, and decided that it would be too extreme to commit more of this arable soil to production of biofuel sources than human food production.

Like anything with broad ranging economic as well as ecological impacts, it quickly becomes very complicated. Also, how you tune multi-parameter systems depends on what you wish to optimize. From an economic point of view, biofuels have an attraction to net importers - every time a country imports oil it exports cash which drags down its currency making all imports more expensive and this is a persistant economic impact since a one time purchase exerts this pressure until the cash is repatriated. On the other hand, biofuel from foodstocks seems a crazy idea given the context of declining oil, increased demand for fuels and increasing demand for food based on population growth - when you do a little of this, it's not a problem but when you project forwards, it could be a form of population control. One ecological effect is that biofuels are naturally cleaner than the stuff that comes out of the ground, especially as extraction shifts towards unconventional sources. The US started into corn ethanol partly as a step towards security and to plump US agriculture. Overall, its not a really smart approach as the total energy input required to produce it is nearly 6 times the net energy produced. By comparison, European production of ethanol from root crops is significantly more energy efficient while Central and South American production from sugar cane is very much more energy efficient and produces a cheaper product. The US plan was obviously mainly directed at assisting domestic production given the major efforts to restrict imports of inexpensive ethanol from countires like Brazil which already have a well developed biofuel economy. From a carbon budget perspective, fossil fuels take carbon that was more or less permanently sequestered and releases it into the environment while biofuels recycle the carbon that is already in the atmosphere and oceans and the biosphere slightly distorting the balance between them but not adding to the total.

Great article which takes a deeper dive into biofuel reality. As we gain more experience with biofuels, some of the intial economic perceptions that we had will continue to need adjustment. As we use entire life-cycle carbon and cost calculations, surprising numbers will continue to be found.

Good point on taking in consideration the whole cycle of production on the biofuels, Naperlou. That's the only want to get a good comparison. Another example is the steel industry's claim that composites eat more energy than steel during processing, and that steel costs less to recycle.

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